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Below is a transcript of Rabbi Doctor Einbinder’s speech:

Sy Dresner Library Dedication, Temple Beth Tikvah (June 11, 2023)

Thank you for the invitation to join you this afternoon, and the privilege of speaking at this dedication.  I am happy to see old friends and mentors like Lynn Cooper and Cantor Romalis, who were so good to me when I was young.  Thank you also to Shirley Laiks, who corresponded with me and who sent along some of the tributes and eulogies for Rabbi Dresner.  It is good also to see Rabbi Beal assume this pulpit.  I am grateful to all of you who have come to add your presence and spirit to this moment.

My parents moved to Wayne in 1960, and I started Hebrew school at Temple Beth Tikvah in 1963.  I was still a child when Rabbi Dresner arrived.  Rabbi Shacknai officiated at my bat-mitzvah in 1967, and Rabbi Norman Patz, who almost made it here this afternoon, shepherded my cohort to confirmation.  These three men were the rabbis I knew before I left Wayne for college.  Years later, I know how unusual it was to have been shaped by such a triad: three very different, very intelligent, men, passionate about Judaism. 

Yesterday’s Torah portion includes God’s command to Moses – the prophet – to tell his brother Aaron – the priest – to light the seven-fold menorah of the wilderness Tabernacle.  “Speak to Aaron and say to him, when you mount the lights, let the seven lights shine ….” (Nu 8:2) : דבר אל-אהרן ואמרת אליו: בהעלותך את הנרות … יאירו שבעת הנרות.  So here, right in the Torah, we discover that raising the light is a clerical responsibility.  That language fails to appear in the seminary’s promotional outreach.  Even in the book of Numbers, buried among all sorts of ritual instructions, it is a theme easy to miss.  Fortunately, the ancient and medieval rabbis were very keen readers, and they tell us that this passage is all about Aaron and a task associated with the priesthood.  According to legend, the lamps were set a bit high:  Aaron, then his descendants, had to climb three steps to reach them.  This suggests that the job entailed a real stretch from one’s normal comfort zone, and so it has been for several millennia, although the form of the lamps has changed.  The rabbis also understood the instructions to mean that the central flame should burn continuously – this was the ner tamid, the eternal light whose modern descendant hangs over the ark and so worried me as a child.  I could not imagine what extraordinary light bulb the Temple was buying to make sure it didn’t go out.  As GE, and Temple maintenance, might have told me, times had changed and so had lighting delivery mechanisms.  But the need for illumination hasn’t.  It is still the heart of what a good rabbi offers.  We need to see where we come from, we need to see where we are going, and we need a steady hand to tether future and past.

First:  As the ancient rabbis were quick to comment, God doesn’t need lanterns, we do.  We are the ones who forget where we come from and discover that we are lost.  We are the ones seeking clarity, insight, passion, and hope.   Connecting us to our history is one way that our rabbis and teachers illuminate the past.  For Rabbi Dresner, Jewish history went back to Sinai, but it encompassed Selma, Saigon, and Tel Aviv.  Weekly, Rabbi Dresner mounted the pulpit, like those ancient priestly steps, to hang his lamps.  He could take his time hanging them.  But his 45-minute, sermon tsunamis were delivered with unshakeable moral compass and a remarkable obliviousness to potential fallout.  In rabbinic school, we were taught to write twenty-minute sermons, and attention spans have steadily shrunken over time.  In contrast, your average biblical prophet clearly had good lungs and used them, and Rabbi Dresner may have preferred their example.   The great preaching rabbis of Renaissance Italy, for that matter, like Judah Modena, thought nothing of delivering a three-hour Sabbath sermon in one synagogue in the morning, then heading across town to give it again somewhere else for minha.   Time, and styles, change.  What I personally loved about Sy Dresner’s sermons was how much there was to think about.  They were sermons full of footnotes, even when the footnotes often got loose and wandered into the body of the text. 

I don’t remember anyone walking out.  Rather, we talked about the sermons, chaotic and rambling as they sometimes were, responding to the flashes that pierced us.  I’m afraid R. Dresner skipped over the centuries that became my personal specialty, the great span of medieval Jewish experience with its Jewish philosophers, physicians, and poets, its cultural awakenings and its darker moments of persecution and expulsion.   But his two-step toggle between biblical history and the twentieth century was common for the times, both as Zionist revisionism and a way of emphasizing the prophetic legacy of social justice that we admired.  At the same time, those sermons traced a very American Jewish trajectory, from the Brooklyn yeshiva and stoops of Sy’s childhood to the encyclopedic if unrestrained overflow of the pulpit rabbi.  Between those two stations, his life spanned the Holocaust, Korea, Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and the birth and wars of the state of Israel.  Each was for him a very Jewish matter, because of our history and how it was read.  

These were sermons that took seriously the charge to mount the sacred lamps and let the light shine. Over the years, I’ve heard many a sermon that came to a neat stop short of the 20-minute yardline, and yet had nothing to say.  If Rabbis Shacknai, Patz, or Dresner had had nothing to say, and if they hadn’t acted on what they said to us, I wouldn’t be standing here today.  And maybe you wouldn’t, either.

 We again live in turbulent times.  Personally and collectively, our future seems uncertain, and more perilous than in my lifetime.  If it is also opaque, as futures must be, our ability to imagine something better seems strangely impaired.  Yet, surely the future matters as much as the past.  Yesterday’s haftarah comes from Zechariah.  Like all haftaroth, it was attached to its Torah portion because it had some kind of echo or “hook” that linked it to that reading.   In this case, it is the seven-piece menorah, which Zechariah sees in a vision long after the real-life Temple and its contents have been destroyed.  In other words, it is an imaginary lamp that could exist in the future, but at the moment hovers only in a vision granted the prophet who has returned from exile to a ruined land.  

We need light on a possible future, too.  If you are a rabbi, a leader, a parent or teacher, that means first teaching your congregants, your children and community how to see themselves in the present, then to hold the real world up to a vision of something better.  Will rabbis ascend their pulpits today and not talk about the threat to the health and lives of women? The threat to gay, trans, and nonbinary members of our communities?  To books and reading, to learning and curiosity?  Will we downplay the racism, the nationalist bigotry and fascism in Israel and here?  What are we supposed to talk about?  What is Jewish spirituality if it spurns wrestling with the tension between real and ideal in the moment and stretching toward a future that looks a bit better?  

 Like most dream visions, Zechariah’s imaginary candelabra is utterly fantastic.  It is filled miraculously from oil lamps suspended above, and its central flame never goes out (the origins of the Eternal Light).  While it is intriguing to speculate on those renewable fuel sources, what is really striking is that a prophet, mired in the conflicts and crises of a struggling community, is asked to see through the turmoil around him to what kind of social and sacred order might be their goal.  The way there demands imagination, the ability to imagine a social, political, and spiritual world transformed.  Indeed, in Judaism, the social, political, and spiritual are inextricable. 

I recently published a book on Jewish responses to a great plague outbreak in northern Italy that lasted from 1630-31.  One chapter dealt with the sermons of a rabbi who preached throughout that pandemic in the Padua Ghetto.    When the plague began, there were 741 Jews in Padua’s Ghetto, and when it ended a year later, there were 420.  Of 24 rabbis, only one survived, Rabbi Solomon Marini.  Preaching was still a highly admired art form among seventeenth-century Italian Jews, and Rabbi Marini could preach with the best of them.  Most of his sermons, which survive only in scribbled outlines, are very learned and full of references to secular and sacred texts.  On one Sabbath, though, shortly after the official end of the pandemic, Rabbi Marini stood in his pulpit and attacked his congregation for the predatory lending and real estate transactions that were making some unscrupulous Jews rich in the chaos following the plague.  It’s true he was the only rabbi left, and unlikely to lose his job.  But his frontal attack defied all the rhetorical guidelines for preaching he had studied, and it must have made some folks mad. 

Years ago, teaching a course on sermons as literature, I showed my rabbinical students the text of a letter Stephen Wise wrote to the NYTimes in 1905. He had just turned down a job offer from Temple Emanuel in NYC; the offer had been contingent upon the trustees’ right to censor his sermons.   Famously, Wise went on to found his own synagogue, the Free Synagogue on W. 68^th St.  The “Free” part came from a line in the letter, where Wise proclaimed: “A pulpit that is muzzled is not a pulpit that is free.”  My students were impressed, and then one sighed.  This could never happen today, he said.  Why, I asked.  Because we would lose our jobs, he answered.  I remember replying: that is exactly the point.     

Not all Beth Tikvah’s congregants enjoyed Rabbi Dresner’s political preaching, which almost did cost him his job.  That never stopped him.  He had a vision of what the world should be, and what Jews should be doing to get there.   Whether he addressed American racial injustice or wars in southeast Asia, the blindered nationalist-religious fervor in Israel, even the fears he expressed for the future of democracy here and in Israel in his last few months, Sy Dresner believed that the moral call outweighed that of making us feel good.  That kind of conviction drew on a prophetic, legal, and moral tradition embodied in sacred texts.   It also drew on a vision of something future, and ideal.

  לא בחיל ולא בכח כי אם ברוחי – “Not by might and not by power, but by My Spirit,” God says through his angel in Zechariah’s dream (Zech 4:6).  In one of the tributes Shirley sent me, a black minister who knew him in the ‘60s said, Sy had the spiritual force.  He was alluding to the Gandhian principle of satyagrahi – soul force – that the civil rights activists made central to their philosophy of nonviolent action.  Soul force, light – they are the same thing in different metaphors, as is the principle of tikkun ‘olam.  There is no repair of the world if you do not have an idea of what it should look like unbroken.  That is Zechariah’s vision. 

Finally, the consolation, which comes in bringing past and future together.  And here I come to books and libraries, which do this work through us.  Zechariah’s idealized Temple wasn’t real, but neither was the depiction of the wilderness Tabernacle found in the book of Numbers.   No one knows what the real wilderness tabernacle looked like.  The detailed descriptions, the workmanship and raw materials they would have required, are not compatible with nomadic desert travelers.  Most of these biblical passages were the work of later priestly writers, who were anxious to show that the Temple originated in that wilderness structure.    For the priestly authors, the Temple architects must have replicated the earlier prototype.  Like constitutional originalists – see, politics! – they asserted that what came later must be rooted in divine architectural intent. 

More likely, it was the other way around, and their past was made to look like what they knew and how they derived authority. Even the Temple lamps were projected backwards to a wilderness prototype.  And so, eerily, we have a Scriptural portion, בהעלותיך – “when you raise up” – that pitches us without warning between two mythical sources of light, one deep in a wilderness origin myth, and one in a futuristic dream of renewable resources and unending light.  Both are literary fantasies, fragments of historical memory bound with mythical mortar.   That is the essence of sacred literature.   To wrestle with Jewish texts at any moment in Jewish history is to hover between two mythic poles – the pole of a mythic past and the pole of a mythic future – and to wobble and tip as we seek our balance.    For thousands of years, other wobblers have preceded us.  Their traces remain in words, in stray scraps of parchment and paper that have survived in all sorts of far-flung and curious places, sometimes even in books.  Just as the lamps themselves change over time, but the light remains constant, so too the medium and packaging of Jewish writing changes, too, but the light of its seekers remains.   

It is testimony to Sy’s love for you – all of you, those who loved him back and those who loved him less – and for this congregation, that the books that shaped and animated him, that fueled those astonishing sermons, that spoke to him across centuries and continents – are now housed here.   Most of us aren’t such fools as to believe that God can or will protect us from the fallout when we take an unpopular stand.   Did Rabbi Marini? Or Zerubbavel, the unlucky would-be king promised glory in Zechariah’s vision?  But we can know that history is full of Marinis and Zerubbavels, who did the right thing even when the odds, and history, defeated them.  We find them in stories, we find them in study, we find them in books.

Hebrew is also part of this story.  Sy’s fluency in Hebrew made a huge impression on me as a teenager, and after 19 years teaching rabbinical students I can assure you it was very rare.  He loved Hebrew.  He spoke Hebrew.  Contemporary writing from Israel helped him work through the issues that mattered to him.  But the modern resurrection of Hebrew was also an act of faith, a link to the language of the Bible and its prophets, and to what forged us in their mold.   I loved to hear him read Torah, which as you know he never chanted.  He read the sacred text as if it were alive – and it was alive, and when you heard it you knew it was a living language that connected him to his beloved Sinai and biblical past.  Hebrew was also a way of fulfilling an obligation to light those ancient lamps.

We always stand stretched, absurdly, precariously, between a mythic past and a mythic future.  In the end, what tethers us is not the lanterns but the light, and what comforts us is the recognition in other records of men and women who sought it, too.  Historians like to describe the ways communities forge a “usable past,” and apparently Jews have been doing that at least since the book of Numbers.  Scholars of religion, for their part, analyze our need for a mythic future.   Once again, being Jewish proves to be a genre and discipline-defying exercise.  A million ways of building a past, and a million ways of imagining the future, characterize millions of Jews throughout history.  Some of them, especially women, never wrote a word, and we can only guess at how they balanced themselves on that inter-mythic high-wire.  Others have left us a record, sometimes in music or artwork, but often in writing and books.  Even our sacred texts ultimately tell a tale of destruction, devastation and salvage – salvage that began with the luminous power of language and the luminous acts of individuals who did what they felt God commanded them to do, because they believed that God stepped into human, animal, plant, and planetary history, and commanded.   God’s first act of creation, after all, was to make light: ויהי אור,  Only then did he create the sun and the moon and vessels that held it.  The vessels, dear priests and prophets, dear people of priests and children of prophets, are secondary.  We, too, are God’s light-bearing vessels.  That’s the good news.  The harder lesson is that it’s not about us; our individual stories flicker and vanish like the tiniest sparks.  What came before us and will be after us, shines through us now.  Imperfect, unsteady, infinitely variable, we do not light lights to get credit, but because we are commanded: to raise the light, to be that light, and ensure that the light will outlive us.  כן יהי רצונו.  Amen.

Susan L. Einbinder

Providence, RI.  June 10, 2023, delivered in Wayne, NJ, June 11, 2023.

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